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The Visage of a Mother’s Success

Author
ALISSA TU, Department of Literature, University of California San Diego

keywords:
Vietnamese Americans, Vietnamese women, beauty 
pageants, Vietnamese diaspora, cultural identity

abstract 
This inquiry is a personal essay about Vietnamese 
American youth participating in a beauty pageant and 
how notions of Western and Eastern beauty collide 
between Vietnamese American youth and their mothers. 
What does the beauty pageant represent for those who 
have been exiled from their homeland? How do ideal 
versions of success influence the participant’s identity or 
sense of self? Who is the ideal Vietnamese American 
beauty queen? By hypothesizing and understanding 
entry points that affect a mother’s perspective, 
Vietnamese American youth, specifically daughters, 
must navigate different ideals to find a sense of 
belonging. While being excluded from parts of American 
society, Vietnamese American youth are faced with 
trauma, values and ethics, racism and sexism while also 
being the personification of a mother’s success. 
Daughters who participate in a beauty pageant enforce 
a sense of community and are a symbol of hope to 
assimilate in America for those who have been exiled, 
and a participant’s success is a product of this 
navigation and a mother’s vicarious desires. In other 
words, the ideal beauty pageant queen must not only be 
able to uphold cultural values embedded in the beauty 
pageant but also their values entangled through familial 
relationships as well. As such, the ideal beauty pageant 
queen can balance both the daughter’s (Western) and 
the mother’s (Eastern) definition of success. 

introduction 
Question of the day: What does my mother believe is the 
ideal Vietnamese beauty queen? 

Nhi T. Lieu (2011) discusses in “Pageantry and 
Nostalgia: Beauty Contests and the Gendered 
Homeland,” that “Vietnamese Americans have 
organized their own beauty pageants to provide 
alternative spaces which ‘ethnic Vietnamese’ women 
have the opportunity to participate and reign as beauty 
queens for their ethnic community” (p. 59). Beauty 
pageants within the Vietnamese community is the 
subject of much small talk. For most Vietnamese 
American youth, they learn about culture through their 
parents so if an ethnic beauty pageant is a way for young 
women to connect with their culture to participate, and 
they learn about culture through their parents, what is 
the relationship between parents and a beauty queen 
identity? 

Possible answer: This pageant is for my mother, and 
she’s reclaiming a homeland that doesn’t exist anymore 
through my participation. By entering the pageant, I am 
tangible evidence that she is safe in America. The beauty 
pageant also affirms my mother has assimilated as Lieu 
(2011) notes, “Vietnamese ao dai beauty pageants are 
one of the most visible examples of Vietnamese 
immigrants trying to negotiate the process of 
assimilating into bourgeois American culture while 
remaining ethnically Vietnamese” (p. 61). By valuing 
my mother’s definition of success and checking off each 
criterion, participating in the beauty pageant means her 
values are validated, and that she, vicariously, can also 
participate in the bourgeois American culture. 



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I call home. Some days, my mother talks a lot. Some 
days, my father hangs up after a few seconds because 
he’s playing Uno with my brother. Other days, my 
mother says little. No matter what, I must be on-guard 
because my mother might ramble that she is miserable, 
scared for my father, or suffering. There is only so much 
I can listen to until my body becomes too weary. I like 
to think I won’t carry my mother’s sadness, but I realize 
I often do. 
 
Thao Thanh Mai’s dissertation, Dilemmas or Choice: 
Family, Love, and Status in the Lives of Young 
Vietnamese-American Women (2006), discusses the 
female Vietnamese American identity, and how family 
affects their idea of success and identity by interviewing 
five different Vietnamese American women. 
 
Because their mothers sacrificed everything to move to 
the States, daughters feel familial obligations to succeed 
in ways their mothers want them to, and that success can 
be measured often through wealth and material status. In 
other words, there’s a debt to pay to parents, and it 
becomes a major factor in how daughters proceed in 
life. Mai (2006) explores this guilt when she interviews 
with Kim who became a pharmacist because of her 
parents. “The ‘intense guilt’ [Kim] felt signified her 
obligation and responsibility to fix what she felt was an 
unjust situation for her parents” (p. 143). Kim justified 
that this decision was because her parents wouldn’t have 
the chance to succeed in attaining wealth or material 
status. There’s a weight to each action. Each decision 
affects how a Vietnamese daughter must fix, become, 
and do what their parents desire because their parents 
never had the opportunity. 
 
Not explicitly discussed is how daughters are held to 
higher expectations than sons because the expectations 
of domesticity and physical appearance aren’t discussed. 
Sons don’t have to know how to take care of the house 
or make sure they look presentable at any given 
moment. This definition of success leaves out beauty 

even though it’s a necessary tool to succeed in life. 
 
There’s an unspoken rule that beauty is also included in 
a parent’s definition of a successful daughter. 
 
When my mother is lucid or delirious, she whispers her 
confessions about the Vietnam War. Her voice titters like 
a hummingbird. It always feels like she knocks the wind 
out of me. Some days, she speaks about Indonesian 
beaches. Other days, she confesses what they did to her. 
Most of the time, she repeats the same phrase. 
 
During a Zoom pageant practice, a contestant and I are 
in a breakout room. She tells me how her mother doesn’t 
approve of her participating in a pageant because she 
isn’t feminine enough. I don’t have an answer most of 
the time because the reality is there’s no fix-it answer. 
This is a common theme. A mother pushing her ideals 
onto her daughter. The amount of love a daughter 
receives is equal to how close she is to her mother’s idea 
of success. 
 
In Life Kit’s “How to squash negative self-talk,” (Kutes, 
2021) Dr. Joy Harden Bradford discusses how the 
negative self-talk stems from early childhood as well as 
many of the -isms that exist in the world—racism, 
sexism, heterosexism, etc. So not only do I have a 
traumatic childhood, but I also have a lot of -isms 
attacking me. Dismantling those  
 
-isms will take constant challenging, which feels a lot 
like suffering. 
 
How does one accept the trauma that is mother inflicted? 
This trauma is guided in the ideals of success, 
perfection, and beauty. Not only does that trauma have 
to be felt, but how does one categorize thoughts as valid 
or unrealistic? 
 
That’s not the only abstract concept running through my 
brain. How do I challenge the Asian American woman 
stereotype? How do I show I’m not submissive, 

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obedient, and partaking in respectability politics? Am I a 
bad Asian woman if I acknowledge these perceptions 
but also use them to my own advantage? Every 
challenge comes with consequences, and every 
consequence includes suffering. The suffering is either 
incongruent with Eastern or Western ideals. If I succeed 
in one challenge, I am failing to uphold at least one set 
of ideals by doing so. There is no ending where I go 
unharmed. It is an absolute. The degree of suffering 
varies. 
 
Transferring suffering, the idea that burdens from 
parents are passed onto daughters, is prominent in Mai’s 
interviews (2006). Some women fully accept choosing a 
financially stable and high social standing career to 
lessen their parents’ burdens. If they can give back 
sacrificing a self-interested yet unstable career because 
their parents sacrificed everything, they would. Others 
have negotiated with these ideas, but how much can be 
given away? 
 
My mother used to say she was happy if her children 
had a good job and did well in life. Whenever she did, 
goosebumps crawled onto my skin. It was sickeningly 
full of guilt because the kindness and care in her words 
never translated into her actions. I was always missing 
something, and she reminded me constantly. I was a bad 
daughter so whenever she told me she just wanted me to 
be comfortable in life, I felt chills. Her actions said she 
wanted to pulverize me with her kind of perfection. The 
altruistic desire was never there. 
 
When my mother learns I have a significant other, she is 
excited because that means I can rely on a family to 
support me. It’s odd because I have no intentions of 
starting a family, and I don’t know why a significant 
other signifies I am getting married. In her eyes, I am 
fulfilling her desires. To have a husband means I’ll be 
financially supported and live comfortably. 
 
Will I succumb to my mother’s desires? 
 

My aunt is the one who sees the pageant flyer first. She’s 
the first to notify me about the mistaken accents on my 
last name. My last name is written as Tú and not as Từ. 
It feels like motherly figures like to take control for their 
“daughters” in hopes to live vicariously through them. 
The daughters don’t necessarily want to pursue 
whatever their mothers have advised. However, the 
mothers push their perspectives onto them. The 
daughters feel the guilt or pressure to follow through 
with these ideas. 
 
Throughout these interviews, Mai (2006) asked the 
Vietnamese mothers how they’d define success. More 
often, it would be about financial stability, a good steady 
career, and a significant other who is just as or more 
educated than their daughter. Those desires are pushed 
onto daughters, and they try to negotiate between their 
mothers’ hopes and their own identity. Every interview 
complicates these two extremes. No one seems 
completely satisfied with who they are. 

My mother texts saying my father hopes all my siblings 
and I have partners and get married. She tells me it’ll 
make him happy. Another chill down my spine. I don’t 
believe he’d bring up this idea on his own. It isn’t like 
him. In my experience, he never had such a definitive 
opinion about my life.  When I casually revealed I was 

Throughout these interviews, 
Mai (2006) asked the Vietnamese 

mothers how they’d define success. More 
often, it would be about financial stability, a 

good steady career, and a significant other who 
is just as or more educated than their daugh-

ter. Those desires are pushed onto daughters, 
and they try to negotiate between their mothers’ 
hopes and their own identity. Every interview com-
plicates these two extremes. No one seems com-
pletely satisfied with who they are.



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interested in girls, he didn’t blink an eye. When I was in 
the hospital, he didn’t say a word. It is unlike him to 
have such a strong opinion and voice them. 
 
My mother texts saying my father hopes all my siblings 
and I have partners and get married. She tells me it’ll 
make him happy. Another chill down my spine. I don’t 
believe he’d bring up this idea on his own. It isn’t like 
him. In my experience, he never had such a definitive 
opinion about my life.  When I casually revealed I was 
interested in girls, he didn’t blink an eye. When I was in 
the hospital, he didn’t say a word. It is unlike him to 
have such a strong opinion and voice them. 
 
It’s like my mother spoon-fed him the answers. She 
asked pointed questions so his answers aligned with her 
ideas. 
 
On my car rides with Contestant #12, she tells me about 
her winter break, and immediately concludes with she 
can’t wait until this pageant is over. Her mother has 
reinforced her ideals and standards of beauty onto her. 
When she tells me that her mother says she needs to diet, 
that the áo dài’s she tried on didn’t fit well, or that it 
needed to be prettier, I swallow my sadness for her. Her 
mother is forcing her to win, which isn’t the point. She is 
doing something for herself and is doing something 
outside of her comfort zone. 
 
There’s no set standard to beauty. Prettiness isn’t defined 
by a body shape. It isn’t defined by the perfect curls that 
the Vietnamese girls I’ve grown up with seem to have. It 
isn’t shaped by makeup. It isn’t an ideal personality. 
There’s no such thing as an ideal beauty. It’s all 
subjective so why is it that beauty is some marker of 
success? 
 
I share Contestant #12’s introduction post on Instagram 
because she doesn’t have social media, and my only 
campaign is to encourage her especially after what was 
discussed in the car before practice. 
 

Growing up, my mother told me that I needed to get my 
hair permed. Waves weren’t that pretty. And growing up 
in traditional Vietnamese dancing, an environment 
where girls were constantly being compared and praised 
when they performed to the choreographer’s liking, it 
was easy to feel alienated even more when all the girls 
had the same straight and thin hair. When they heat-
ironed their hair into curls, the results were always 
beautiful. On me, it added more volume to my thick hair. 
On me, I felt out of place and in another world. On those 
days, I used to think that my mother was right, that I 
needed to do something about this hair to be beautiful. 
 
After several years of straightening my hair in high 
school, burning strands so they were as straight as my 
mother’s and hoping to burn away the thickness, I gave 
up on straightening. It was too much work, and I got 
more compliments with my wavy hair, much to my 
mother’s dismay. 
 
I felt like an outsider because of the waves. My hair 
didn’t curl like the other girls. I was constantly getting 
told I looked bù xù from my mother. This hair I was 
born with wasn’t close to what my mother wanted, and 
because of my natural, thick, coarse, hair, I didn’t appeal 
to my mother’s idea of success. 
 
I buy lashes and eyeliners for the pageant. Mostly 
because I want to practice having stage makeup for the 
pageant. I realize that a month isn’t enough time to 
perfect a skill. Instead, I get Invisalign two days before 
our second photoshoot and am self-conscious because 
the attachments are on my front teeth. The attachments 
look like tooth tumors. My speech sputters because of an 
artificial lisp. 
 
I tell Contestant #6 about my Invisalign, and she 
understands the torture. We bond for the first time, and I 
am suddenly much more comfortable with pieces of 
plastic on my teeth. For the rest of the photoshoot, I’m 
joking and laughing with the female photographer, who  
 



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enjoys the company. Making fun of choreography and 
laughing like a scream. 
 
When I visit for a school break, my mother tells me I’m 
prettier with makeup. I think she wants me to look 
closer to her success.  
 
Contestant #12 initially joins the pageant because it’s 
outside of her comfort zone, but she also tells me it’s 
because her friend pushed her to join the pageant. At 
some point, she tells everyone that she hopes to practice 
her Vietnamese for the pageant since she doesn’t use 
Vietnamese often in her immediate family. Because the 
pageant doesn’t equip the contestants with any kind of 
Vietnamese help though, it is impossible for her to 
practice her Vietnamese. In other words, her goal is 
unattainable because there are no resources or support 
for Vietnamese. 
 
As a personal anecdote, Mai (2006) discusses how her 
socialization is partially due to her entangled 
relationship with her parents. She defines, “By entangled 
family relationship, I mean that my family is an 
interconnected part of my identity and consciousness” 
(p. 89). Her identity, values, and morals are affected by 
her parents. This entanglement plays a strong part in 
how Vietnamese women in her interviews negotiate not 
only the notions of “success,” but how these aspects are 
negotiated and expressed in their individualism. 
 
Discussed explicitly in the conclusion, Mai (2006) 
relates her work to theorists of narrative and identity 
who discuss how reflecting on the past is an identity 
construction. To reflect, understand, and find coherence 
from the past mistakes, wrongs, and experiences can 
inform how a person can create the future self. 
 
My mother teaches me how to fold eggroll wrappers 
with shrimp. At twenty-five, I start to learn how to cook 
from my mother. It’s almost 11, I can feel my mind start 
to lose focus as I keep making the same mistakes. 
Unlike the times before, I’m not reminded of my 

mother’s complaints or moments that I can’t do it right 
which leads to you never being able to get a grasp at it. I 
place the filling in the middle of the paper, I break the 
shrimp tails, and I roll diagonally until I have to fold in 
the edges, and seal with egg. I screw up on the folding 
most of the time, but my mother continues to undo my 
wrapping, and shows me where I went wrong. 
 
I keep trying until my eyelids get too heavy. She tells me 
that she’ll show me how to make it next time I visit, and 
that it was a good try. Her tenderness is rare. Oftentimes, 
that tenderness is under a mask of guilt or shame, and 
for her to be tender means there is a mistake on the 
horizon. It’s like waiting for a critique because I 
“should” know how to do this. Instead, her kindness is 
authentic and nourishing. She notices the effort in the 
exhaustion, and patiently shows me how to fold. These 
moments are rare, and I cherish it even if she’ll critique 
me tomorrow. 
 
“You have more of an aggressive posing.”

“What does that mean?”

“Never mind. I won’t say it.”

“Tell me!”

“I’m going to stop talking. It’s a good thing.”

The other photographer that day is a man, and I end up 
just flirting with the camera afterwards, teeth tumors and 
all.

My mother used to tell me that I should do things to my 
body to look prettier. She laughed about my tiny boobs 
and joked about getting plastic surgery to have them 
enhanced. She wasn’t joking most of the time. 
 
When I finally tell my mother that I am in a pageant, she 
asks if the other contestants are pretty. 
 
According to Lieu (2011), “Ao dai beauty pageants are 
significant not only because they bridge symbols of 



the past with bodies that represent the future, but also 
because they work ideologically to evoke an “imagined 
community” that authenticates the persistence of 
Vietnamese ethnicity…” (p. 61). I wonder what the 
imagined community my mother wants if I am her 
symbol of success. Does she live vicariously through me 
to be a part of a community that she can’t fully access? 
 
Jennifer, a high school interviewee for Mai’s (2006) 
dissertation, discusses how she didn’t fit in with 
other Asian girls, and pointed out that Asians should 
assimilate and be “normal.” According to her, her 
mother is “unassimilated” to America, and Jennifer 
dichotomizes her life into Asian or American. 
 
She attacks Vietnamese beauty pageants by saying “I 
think it’s a play on being exotic. And then you invite all 
the white people and the council members, people like 
that, and you try to make up publicity and fund raise. I 
think it’s selling our exoticism…you know, this is why 
we’re always seeming different and foreign” (p. 125). 
 
Not a lot of white people show up to my pageant. 
The pageant is selling something, but it is not for 
white folks. It’s a dream for Vietnamese people. 
Mothers live vicariously through their daughters. 
The Vietnamese community dream of pageant girls 
because they symbolize the American bourgeoise, and 
that representation shows that they can also, one day, 
acculturate into that class. 

Though, I have to give it to Jennifer. Selling exoticism 
is just another way to say fetishization, and it’s a game 
I play into until I win all I need. The consequences are 
always worse than the winnings. 
 
A contestant’s mother calls on the last day of practice 
and demands to speak to the “boss” to ensure her 
daughter is at practice and not somewhere else. I’ve 
seen this scene play out in different situations: church, 
community college, and during classes. There’s always 
an inkling of paranoia. I see the mother’s concern as 
crossing boundaries. An overbearing and overprotective 
Vietnamese mother is like a modern-day villain, given 
too much of a backstory and complicated. Rooting for 
the villain is a kind of harm that I wish people would 
stop projecting. Pain is still pain even if the trauma is the 
origin. 
 
Before I knew my flight out of Seattle was canceled 
and I was staying in Olympia longer, my family and I 
played bingo. My mother laughed and called numbers 
like she was a child who was enjoying games. It was a 
small spark of joy. She put cash in red envelopes. She 
told me about her unlucky nickname. Snow blanketed 
the outside world. Our Christmas tree was still up. My 
mother’s laughter. Her joy.

I treasure the moment. I treasure this happiness in her.

I choose to fulfill my duties as First Princess, the runner 
up to the queen because if I am not completely and 
utterly the dripping image of success according to my 
mother which is a beautiful Catholic Vietnamese woman 
who is financially stable, my mother can still brag that 
her daughter is a princess. Because even if I fail at being 
beautiful, even if I fail at being Catholic, even if I fail at 
being the daughter she wanted, she can still be proud of 
me. 
 
Mai (2006) finds and concludes in her dissertation that 
“the discourse of success as it is in articulated in my 
socialization and within the Vietnamese community 
involves one’s whole way of being and that involves 

Not a lot of white people 
show up to my pageant. The 

pageant is selling something, but it is 
not for white folks. It’s a dream for Viet-

namese people. Mothers live vicariously 
through their daughters. The Vietnamese 

community dream of pageant girls because 
they symbolize the American bourgeoise, 
and that representation shows that they can 
also, one day, acculturate into that class.

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how one carries oneself, who one associates with, 
the decisions one makes and the moral implications 
attached to them, how one represents oneself and one’s 
family, and much more” (p. 170). Success is defined 
in Vietnamese women as their whole being and life. 
How others see these women in all aspects of her life is 
synonymous to her success. 
 
My mother wants to live vicariously through her 
idealized version of me. Her daughter who has straight 
thin hair, who follows every Catholic rule to the period, 
who has bigger boobs and prettier makeup. She wants to 
live through her subjective successful daughter. 
 
All I want is for my mother to love me. I want to be 
able to have conversations with her. One of my goals 
includes perfecting Vietnamese so I could write a love 
letter to her. I want to be able to make her feel loved 
because maybe then she would stop telling me I am 
useless. That I’m, good enough. That I’m someone she 
is proud of because I am me. Instead, the only times 
I make her happy are when I’m doing the chores that 
relieve her of time, when I go to church without her 
reminders, and when I pretend that I believe in the same 
things as her.  I realized a long time ago, that it isn’t 
possible to be what she wants, and her approval will 
never come. 
 
But it’s complicated. As much as I know I won’t 
ever receive that approval, I still crave my mother’s 
happiness. Whenever she praises me for washing the 
dishes without her asking, whenever she calls me a 
“good girl” for attending a holy day of obligation, 
whenever she finds harmony in teaching me to roll 
eggrolls, and whenever I can see the joy on her face as 
she tells me stories during bingo, it feels like intimacy 
is being fulfilled. If I can continue to hide the parts she 
doesn’t enjoy, will I continue to receive that joy? Can 
acceptance be partial? Do I need her to love all of me? 
And do I need to love all of her? 
 
 

The voice in my head that constantly suffocates me 
is my mother’s. Her voice haunts me in Vietnamese, 
but her implications consume in English. Though, I’m 
unsure what to make of it because things have changed. 
I don’t live in the same house. I can convey ideas in 
Vietnamese to her on a basic level. I have given up on 
my mother’s ideas of beauty. I have given up on her 
desires of who I should be. I have given up on being a 
proper Catholic Vietnamese daughter. Yet her voice still 
tramples my thoughts. They still hum in the background 
like a lullaby. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Dutes, K. (Host). (2021, December 16). How to squash 
negative self-talk [Audio podcast episode]. In LIFE Kit. 
NPR. https://www.npr.org/2021/12/09/1062746913/
how-to-stop-being-self-critical-and-silence-negative-
self-talk 
 
Lieu, N.T. (2011). “Pageantry and nostalgia: Beauty 
contests and the gendered homeland.” The American 
Dream in Vietnamese (pp. 59-77). University of 
Minnesota Press. 
 
Mai, T. T. (2006). Dilemmas or choices: Family, love, 
and status in the lives of young Vietnamese-American 
women. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University 
of California, Davis.

References




